The Boundaries
of Her Body:
The Troubling History of Women’s Rights in America
Debran Rowland
Sourcebooks, Inc., 2004

Review
by Margaret Foley

“One
step forward, two steps back” would also be an appropriate
subtitle for Debran Rowland’s fascinating and well-written
study of women’s rights in the United States. Rowland interprets
the historical experience of women through the prism of the legal
system. By focusing on laws and their interpretations, Rowland vividly
demonstrates the central thesis of her book— that women’s
rights are never easily won and that once won, those rights are
often in danger of being restricted or rescinded.

The book’s four
sections cover the status of women from the seventeenth to the early-twenty-first
century, reproductive rights, female adolescence, and violence against
women. Although the bulk of The Boundaries of Her Body analyzes the second half of the twentieth century to the present,
the historical background illustrates the long-standing pattern
of legal advancement and setback in women’s rights. The earliest
documents of American history, such as the 1620 Mayflower Compact,
gave women rights only through their association with men. It was,
and in many cases still is, a commonly held belief that men needed
to regulate female sexuality and procreation. However, by the end
of the nineteenth century, the situation began to change. Women
began to own businesses, run households, become educated, and enter
the workforce.

Historically, each gain
women won led to others. Education led to agitation for information
about birth control, revised family laws, and entrance to professions,
such as medicine and the law, formerly off-limits to women. Voting
rights led to larger political participation, which led to civil
rights laws, laws against pregnancy and gender discrimination, and
to contemporary battles over abortion and same-sex marriage.

But, restrictions often
accompanied gains. Women have never been accorded the “natural
rights” given to men. Any law regarding women occurs within
the cultural framework of the time, leaving women at the mercy of
a “debate over what a woman is; what a woman ought
to be; and what a woman should, therefore, be allowed to do.”

While the book covers
a wide range of topics such as discrimination, same-sex marriage,
assisted reproductive technologies, and the effects of technology
and globalization on women’s rights, three of the most interesting
portions of the text cover abortion rights, female adolescence,
and violence against women.

A benefit of Rowland’s
legal focus is that she can show how a small shift in the legal
landscape has wide-ranging repercussions. Most people are familiar
with the rights conferred by legislation such as the Civil Rights
Act, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, or Supreme Court rulings, such
as Roe v. Wade, but legal language and laws can be used
in much subtle ways to undercut rights.

An example of this is
her discussion of the push by the anti-abortion movement to make
the fetus a person. Anti-abortion activists have successfully inserted
their terminology into public discourse. For example, Laci Peterson
is described as carrying an unborn child, not a fetus.
The use of unborn child confers a sense of personhood that
the word fetus does not. While court cases have often upheld the
constitutional zone of privacy around women’s bodies, the
cultural shift in what defines a child created a new set of ways
to attack abortion rights. These include charging pregnant women
with child abuse, attempting to take unborn children into custody
(which effectively means taking the mother into custody), attempting
to issue death certificates for fetuses, and interfering in medical
decisions, such as whether or not a pregnant woman has the right
to refuse medical treatment.

Supporters of these methods
and laws argue that they are only trying to protect women and children,
but they do the opposite by making it more difficult for women to
make informed decisions about their reproductive health. The net
effect is to “seek to elevate the status of unborn fetuses
over those of living women— that Roe v. Wade was
supposed to settle. The rights of women were supposed to be superior
to those of the ‘fetuses.’”

Rowland treats attitudes
and laws regarding female adolescence as part of this larger trend
to control women’s sexuality. The problem for adolescent girls
is that society and the legal system send contradictory signals
as to when someone should be treated as a girl and when someone
should be treated as a woman. For example, a female minor can have
access to birth control, be married at age 18, have two children
by the age of 20, but not be allowed to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.

In today’s society,
Rowland argues, being a girl is not easy:

[I]n attempting
to detail the modern world of today’s pre-woman, there are
at least three “girls” to be spoken of: (1) Biology’s
Girl, the female child moving through the stages of becoming a
woman; (2) Society’s Girl, the young person urged by the
pressures of modern culture to live in the guise of a woman; and,
(3) the Law’s Girl, who remains legally incapable of engaging
in adult, “womanly” behavior unless the state has
consented.

This type of social construction
is dangerous. Current research documents the increase in precocious
puberty, the increase in sexual pressure, and the increase in the
numbers of girls who have sex before the age of 16 and/or have sex
with adult males. The American legal landscape does not acknowledge
the everyday environment of adolescent girls. To the threat of rape,
unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual harassment
in schools, and social and media objectification, the state answers
with laws that push abstinence, restrict access to abortion and
contraception, and half-heartedly attempt to regulate the damaging
effects of American culture.

These contradictory impulses
are also seen in laws that purport to protect women from violence.
Violent acts are committed against women everyday, and this violence
“runs the gamut from the clearly urgent— bumps, bruises,
and fractures— to the less immediate, though in many ways
just as controlling.” Unfortunately, it’s only the sensational
stories of child molestation, missing or dead pregnant women, and
serial killers that gain widespread attention. Many policy experts,
theorists, and academics spend more time explaining why violence
against women occurs rather than offering viable solutions to the
problem.

In fact, many assault
laws are written on the basis of assumptions that are false. Rape
and assault laws assume that the victim does not know the perpetrator,
but, in fact, the majority of victims have had some contact with
the perpetrator. As a result, many cases turn on the credibility
of the victim, rather than on the facts of the crime. “[W]here
‘prior relationships’ exist between a victim who charges
rape and the defendant who is accused of it, judges, juries, legislatures,
and attorneys have long proved more skeptical of the women charging
rape than of the men accused.”

This leads to situations
is which lawyers have attempted to subpoena women’s gynecological
records, and, in the case of the recently dropped charges against
basketball player Kobe Bryant, successfully argued to admit the
plaintiff’s past sexual history, regardless of the fact that
it had little to do with the events surrounding the rape charge.

The 1994 Violence Against
Women Act is another example of how the court system limits legal
protections. The act stated that people “have the right to
be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender” and it
allowed, for the first time, gender crimes to be tried in the federal
court system. Many human rights groups considered the federal remedy
for gender-motivated crimes essential because “state agencies
often systematically failed to ‘vigorously’ pursue cases
involving violence against women.” However, in 2000 after
hearing two combined court cases involving the rape of a female
student by football players at Virginia Polytechnic, the Supreme
Court ruled that placing gender crimes in the federal system was
not allowed under the constitution. This ruling returned such cases
to the inefficiencies and arbitrariness of the state courts.

The Boundaries of
Her Body has some minor problems. Many topics are introduced
and then dropped without analysis. Legal terminology is not always
clearly explained, and while interesting, information about policies
in other countries often disrupts the narrative flow, rather than
adding to it.

That said, the book reads
extremely well and is an excellent study of women’s rights’
law in the United States. Critical ideas, laws, and cases are summarized
in sidebars, which makes the book a useful reference tool. Most
importantly, the book sounds a clear warning to those who believe
the law and the courts often succeed in redressing social and legal
inequities. They don’t. As women we need to be aware that
very often, the system is not on our side.